April 2009

April 30, 2009

I just discovered that the NYC fly-by of Air Force One that still has a lot of people freaked had some interesting details heretofore unknown and not discussed. Spook86 gives some details with an eye towards how this was not an exercise in economy. I see it as I bet Obama sees it, as an opportunity to show off a part of American history black Americans are particularly fond of.

Air Force sources have confirmed that the F-16s that escorted the VC-25
over Manhattan are assigned to the Alabama Air National Guard, not the
D.C. Guard as the AP (and other media outlets) originally reported. The
Alabama guard has painted some of its Vipers in a distinctive "red
tail" paint scheme, honoring the legendary Tuskegee Airmen of World War
II. One of the fighters observed over Manhattan had the same markings.

There is a characteristic way that old black men I have known say 'uhm hmm', that tells you 'I told you so' without saying a word. And so there are no words to counter such expressions. This is more than a fist bump. You can bet that the Lemming Press will brook no dissent.

But just in case you aren't impressed with such sentiments, the additional cost of flying that F-16 up from Alabama was an extra hundred grand or so. A mere pittance by any government standard. So let's see if the black military pride angle gets played up or down.

I happen to think it's cool and clever, but he should have been in front of it and let everybody in NYC know. You can't show off and keep secrets at the same time. What? Is he ashamed?

My good friend Ed Hopkins is probably the second most well-read person I know. This morning he interjected some observations about what would impress him about law students (he's a law student). I responded.

It's interesting to observe the ways in which you describe the distinctions between law students amongst themselves. We lay-victims only notice your collective capacity to exploit our petty jealousies, defend the indefensible, and destroy the value of common sense. The most telling phrase I hear attorneys say is 'pray that you never need me', which I do on occasion. I'm not trying to demonize, but I do wonder if the legal profession has arced towards dealing only with the troublesome. In other words, what is it that draws ordinary people through the profession that makes them ultimately defenders of our increasingly complex and obfuscated law. Is there not, ever, an effort to simplify?

It took me a very long time to understand the value of complex law. The analogy was that law is like a dense jungle between the desire of mankind and the object of his desire. Were it not difficult to negotiate, everyone would get everything all the time. Thus the value of law's complexity is to allow a man to do anything, but only if he is most persistent. At this point, it only sounds like bad religion - a series of fetishised fetters on our freedom for our own good.

Of course I defend the concept of liberty, freedom under the law, but I am always concerned that the law is becoming more like that microlubricant that Carroll Shelby hawks. It doesn't only get between the friction generating engine parts, it penetrates into the steel itself.

We are now met on the great battlefield for the future of the American economy, and its banking system in particular. We are in a Depression, so says Judge Posner, and I agree with his thesis. So we are faced, ultimately with dealing with the networked effects of what passes for the wisdom of the moment. There is plenty of evidence from the information that I get, that that wisdom is neither great nor consistent and so will inevitably cost us. We are trying to think our way out of one pain for fear of taking it on the chin and so are likely to navigate ourselves into a position of catching a blow to the throat.

The law is an ossified relief of the positions of policy which fit more or less within the bounds of Constitutionality. And yet as I look at the law from the perspective of a software programmer and essayist, I know that it cannot be as logically sound as all that. The imagination of attorneys to make citations outside of a narrow context would be impossibly constrained were the law to flow from a singular perspective. It would not be a dense jungle but a concrete maze.

I worry today, in spite of my conservative bearing, that we do not take some libertarian opportunity to clear the legal jungle as our economy undergoes drastic change. More specifically, and in reference to the passing of the Special Interest State, we need that room.

April 28, 2009

I went to a memorial service yesterday and was somewhat weirded out by the fact that I knew absolutely nobody there. Since I work in a bizarre kind of niche industry, I am often put in such situations, where I know things that people assume that I don't and isn't it weird that you're here because we don't expect you. It's one of the reasons I'm attracted to spycraft.

Anyway, on the way back home from San Diego's Kate Sessions Park overlooking majestic Mission Bay, I turned on the radio to KPFK, our Pacifica Radio affiliate in Southern California. It was rather fascinating to hear the kind of disjointed ranting they do because I haven't listened on a regular basis since 1987. The thing they were ranting about was the tangential to State of Play which I also saw of the weekend. It was print media vs the blogosphere. Now this morning I got a link about Twitter, some cartoon about dogs and Twitter disinformation and a request for a picture of my son from somebody who doesn't want it emailed, but snail mailed on Kodak paper.

Here's the problem. Everything we know about representative democracy and the imperatives of the Fourth Estate is undergoing profound change because of technology. This is, despite what anybody likes to think about , still the Information Age. And quite frankly, I think it is reasonable to believe that the Industrial Revolution which ultimately created the Jet Set was really just a precursor to what the real end will be, and that is more like village society. But before I go into any theories about village society, let me just focus on the KPFK debate and the the lede of Russell Crowe's latest flick.

I'm going to spoil it OK, so if you haven't already seen State of Play then you really need to stop reading this paragraph. But in the end, what happens is that what smells all over like a global conspiracy is really nothing more than a little local murder. If this film is to be taken as realistic, the fact that what sells newspapers is basically spectacular is absolutely right - it means that the business model for newspapers is very wrong and the only way it's going to change is when people realize that you cannot sell politics and sports in the same paper. Newspaper editors, I believe, think they are more important than they are- the fact of the matter is that it does come down to a few good writers, and a few good writers can be had for much less than the price of supporting all of that printing equipment and gasoline powerd distribution network. The resources of big newspapers don't seem to be doing what they should - how can it be all about the deadline? What difference does breaking news make, really? If it takes a persistent fellow like John Young at Cryptome some years and processing of FOIA cases to get the real deal on some story as important as exactly what's going on at Site R Raven Rock, then that's what it takes. You cannot feed that economy with classified ads. Newspapers have not adopted to the information economy. Newspapers are not our only news organizations, and the professionals in that business have to recognize.

When I speak about alternative literacy, I'm talking about the Long Tail, Dunbar's number and power laws. I'm talking about the ways in which particular information appeals to particular individuals that don't necessarily aggregate in the ways we think of 'the public'. It's true that a story about torture or mayhem will attract large audiences, but that's something that the blogosphere has proven it can do very well. Drawing large audiences is the point of all mass communications and propaganada, but are such affairs crucial to the running of the republic? In other words, if Hollywood takes over network news, is our democracy decidedly in decline? I think the answer is no in a way that sounds cynical on the surface - which is that the American Elite knows what it needs to know. Again it's not that the traditional media isn't important, it's just not important to the same fraction of society their marketing numbers suggest.

Think of it in terms of 'actionable information'. If every 5th grader in America was exposed to Julius Caesar, how many of them will make use of the wisdom it could impart? In the new world, only those 5th graders who *want* to see the play will, because the rest will have a choice - alternative literacy. You cannot force every 5th grader to watch, but the presumption of the old media is that they were owed that mass market share.

It might be disturbing to many that significant majorities are not attuned to the highest quality reporting that large media organizations could provide, but if you understand information theory the way I do you wouldn't be troubled. I think of it exactly like I think of the information about nuclear weapons. Like the fifth graders at the Shakespeare Festival, the information is out there to be had if you are persistent in pursuing it, but for that information to be actionable, requires no small effort on your part. The most valuable information is valuable to producers, not necessarily consumers. This is why high quality literacy doesn't apply to a consumer society. If snooty newspaper editors realized that, they wouldn't bleat so loudly. Or perhaps even more cynically, they do understand that which is why they sell classifieds and employ paparazzi with only a nod to serious journalism. Inventing CNN, Ted Turner had it right in the beginning. Now only Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal seem to have it right. They know that their audience is elite and will pay, and so that elite pays.

Again, I am using information theory. It takes energy to sustain knowledge and the discipline that makes that knowledge actionable. When the consumer can get a simulacrum of knowledge for free, the marginal utility of newsprint is not worth it, especially given the quality of information the web provides free. Note that all of this applies to higher education as well, except that higher education in America has priced itself out of reality. The bursting of that bubble is immanent. I'm attracted to spycraft - to information whose value is partly determined by the relative few people who know it.

We should take note of American suceptibility to markets. We are a market-oriented society. In that regard P.T. Barnum's aphorism applies. There is a sucker born every minute. But more aptly, if a fair price is whatever price the market will bear, such things apply to our literacy as well. A good education is what the market rewards whether or not that education includes anything of absolute value. A fair election is whatever the electorate will vote for. Everything is a horse race. And because America is extraordinarily wealthy, there is always good money to follow after bad. It will, I think, unfortunately take us all to the very brink. With any luck, I and everyone I know will be dead before that occurs.

Perhaps I have come full circle as I find myself thinking once again about Marshall Blonsky's dissection of American high culture - how it is a mere semiotic swamp of relativism. Even those so absolutely convinced that they operate on the basis of unchangeable 'values' often mistake the value of singular principles applied overbroadly. Be that as it may what is clear to me these days is that only subscribers, paying subscribers in information consumption markets are going to get their money's worth.

I'm not certain how this bodes for the nation. Because as loathe as I am to think about it at length, I know that there are not many levers of power available to the unsure grasp of the masses. Nor is our cheap and free information going to teach us how to reach and properly control them. The fate of the nation will be dependent on the ethics and fates of Caesar and Brutus and honorable men.

April 27, 2009

April 24, 2009

One of the principles of the Old School is that there is no such thing as 'dirty laundry'. There is no squealing on the 'black community' and there are no secrets. There is only the truth of what's out there, good, bad and ugly. So one of Cobb's Rules is that black culture is transparent. It's a useful idea to keep in hand.

The best movie you won't see in a theatre is The International. It slipped right by under the fury of Watchmen but was a much better film. And now we know who, it's Clive Owen who has the chance to replace Harrison Ford in dramas of this sort. It's not the best film on corruption ever, but it goes way up there just below the level of Michael Clayton.

GVDL paid me one of the best compliments I've had as a writer. It's one of those small things that might make all the difference, just like the suggestion several years ago that I should blog. It won't be forgotten.

And yet he said something equally devastating, but true. He said that my thinking is a work in progress; at least that's what I heard. I have decided not to decide. I'm not on a mission. I just have a direction and I'm not completely convinced and don't particularly need to be ... the word evades me. I need to be right, I just don't always feel like proving it.

So I twittered the fragment that stuck and later began to explain what I meant, which is perfectly apropos. A provocative tweet was enough to satisfy the moment. But now I have to explain. To wit.

What if skilled people are not supposed to think?

Think philosophically is what I mean. What if happiness were only possible from thinking a particular combination of thoughts? What if everybody who has to work for a living and gather skills will never have enough time or discipline to put that combination together in their heads?

I think about this whenever I am between projects. Not having to focus on my clients' system problems allows me to free up some brain space with philosophical stuff like this I am writing. English for people instead of Perl for machines. And I'm trying to get that combination - except that I'm happy as a worker. My career fulfills. In my spare time I shoot and drive on the gaming console and I attempt transcendental inquiry. You can expect many thousands of words.

It's maddening to read F. Scott Fitzgerald and Rudyard Kipling at this late date. I know, I have learned and forgotten a dozen computer languages and in the intellectual meritocracy that is some fraction of American society, I have received my props. No I didn't sell a dot com, but I've learned to be satisfied. Don't we all? It's not that they are so utterly brilliant - well it is, but it's also that I might have saved myself some time. I wonder back and I recall thousands of names in my little black electronic rolodex and I try to guess what I said that let them know I wasn't quite ready.

We only know what we know, and we have to accept what we are. But that leaves open what we might be. If human development 'true happiness', or 'true enlightenment' lies on a path before us, we may not always choose or even see that path. I think maybe we're all too busy to get there.

April 23, 2009

I just browsed through an interesting and new blog to me called Black Women Blow the Trumpet. I read the first post reviewing a film about a woman caught in a web of pity and thought eww. But I soldiered on through more and found an interesting passage.

At this think tank, we have examined many aspects of the conditioning that occurs in those constructs. The emotional baggage that most of them have unknowingly accepted seems to have fostered several fallacies:

Fallacy #1: Black women have to take responsibility for black children.Fallacy #2: Black women have to prefer black men above other men.Fallacy #3: Living among all blacks proves blackness and affirms racial loyalty.Fallacy #4: Black women should uplift/rescue black men in order to solidify their own destinies.Fallacy #5: Black women are not highly desired by men of other races so they should do everything they can to be validated and chosen by black men.Fallacy #6: Leaving all-black constructs will result in social isolation among non-blacks and rejection by blacks who are in black constructs.Fallacy #7: Divestment requires the rejection of black men.

It stays juicy and it gets better. We get interesting passages like this:

In order for black women to leverage their resources wisely, they need to understand how to shrewdly navigate the social systems in several different cultures within this country. Multiculturalism requires mastering of social systems of several cultures.

I have noticed that many black women are not ashamed of being culturally ignorant. They make uninformed and stunningly ignorant comments about other groups without any embarassment at all. They actually think that blacks, whites and Latinos are separate races. They don't know the difference between a racial group and an ethnic group. They decide that the cultural ignorance embraced by others justifies their own ignorance. For black women, the costs of remaining culturally ignorant is too high.

We finally land here:

I think that black women need to think strategically about how to leverage their agenda within all settings that they find themselves in. We need to stop focusing on gaining acceptance from other groups, and begin to strategically leverage the Four Pillars of Black Self Actualization:Dismantle!Divest!Diversify!Dominate!

There is both odd consistency and inconsistency in what the author, Lisa, a black minster, writes. But it's clear that she recognizes the wreckage wrought by the false loyalty to blackness. She appears to be desirous of reconstructing blackness, and I wonder how close she will come to tossing it out entirely. I note this because she is definitely critical of afrocentrism and she adopts a post 9/11 mentality with regard to understanding that a social bomb has gone off in black America and so many people are still picking up the pieces. On the one hand she is wary of multiculturalism to the extent that it is somewhat defined by whites (but she never says white liberals, which is why she may be in a quandary) and yet she clearly understands that her black women subjects will not be respected if they do not reciprocate respect for other cultures.

But what is clear is that she appears to recognize no black orthodoxy. So it comes as no surprise, as pomo as her reading list suggests, that she is a deconstructor of black identity. That's useful, and I think that on the road to recovering a sense of individuality that black Americans have sacrificed, her writing will be paid more attention.

Because I choose my words very carefully I'm making the distinction between torture and brutal interrogation. Just as I make the distinction that many people choose to ignore, between immigration and illegal immigration, between gay marriage and civil union you'll find many people with bashing conservatives on their mind pretending that I don't. So here we go again.

To make things clear, the difference between torture and brutal interrogation in my mind is that torture is aimed at destruction of the subject. Interrogation is aimed at gaining information. I make the distinction along the same lines as I make the distinction between individual citizens shooting each other in the streets and police officers shooting in the streets. Simply because an officer shoots someone dead in the line of duty does not make them a murderer. They are authorized to use deadly force under circumstances laid out in policy. They are proxies for the people. Likewise our military and spy agencies are proxies for the people. In our defense, we burden them with doing things that we are incapable or unwilling to do.

I will stipulate that waterboarding is not torture but that it is brutal. I would call it a brutal interrogation. On a scale of brutality, I don't find it particularly high, but that's enough mincing of words. The moral distinction between torture and interrogation is the intent and the proxy as well as the degree. I don't find it immoral for a police officer to kill a human being in his line of work, which can be admittedly brutal. That is the nature of a proxy. A proxy gets an immunity based upon the service rendered on behalf of society. The suspect is certainly just as dead as if he were murdered in cold blood, but it doesn't make the cop a murderer. Similarly, someone who is interrogated using brutal methods - say cigarette burns, suffers the same amount of pain as someone who is tortured for the purposes of terrorizing a community, but there is a distinction based upon the license an individual is given by society to do so.

The point is that because we know that brutal interrogation works, it is a tool that can be used in defense of society. It is part of a structured defense, it is not an ad-hoc act of desperation, it is a rationalized and calculated act whose aim is the protection of society. In this regard it is not whether or not the act itself is brutal then therefore to be avoided as a moral hazard, but the circumstances under which it is deployed. Brutal interrogation is a defensive weapon. And because it is an effective weapon, we understand how its use by the enemy compromises our position.

Here's the quote of the day from Belmont.

Nobody I know, or have heard of who has had experience in real-life
situations has ever said, “our cell should continue as usual and the
safehouse should remain open, despite the fact that one of our own is
being tortured by the secret police, because I read in the New York
Times that coercion never works.” The probability is that torture works
and that is for that reason its use constitutes a moral dilemma; and
the reason why Jacoby believes he is expressing a noble sentiment when
he forswears it even as “a last and desperate option” in the War on
Terror.

So there's this dilemma. All of those disclosed brutal interrogations which have taken place under the authority of the US Government was done for national security reasons. Since 9/11 there have been three captives subjected. There is a certain moral consistency in the pacifist argument against the Long War or any war. The objection against brutal interrogation on principle which is based not on degree but on proxy is the same as one of disarming police officers on principle. It is the zero-tolerance argument, and I find it morally sound. However, as this objection comes from citizens who benefit from the 'ill-gotten gains' all the same as those who support it, there are no clean hands. We all live in a society whose policy it is to allow immunity for brutal interrogations. Whether or not we actually do interrogate brutally, the moral burden of that brutality is shared by all citizens, in the same way as the fact that we have nuclear weapons. The immoral gravity of that burden depends upon the conditions under which this weapon has been deployed. In the same way that any state with police can become a police state, any state with brutal interrogations can become brutal. It is a matter of corruption. But the mere deployment of police or brutal interrogations does not automatically push us over the brink. Rather, it is when we push the system towards a lack of restraint when we jeopardize legitimate rule.

Here's what I said about the consequences of pushing the envelope in 2004:

I think that the Administration has every right to push the envelope
as regards immunity [of interrogators]. To the extent that we are sovereign and we have to
fight dirty the President ought to have the leeway to do so.
Absolutely. But the inevitable consequence of crossing over that grey
area is rooted in the implication of reserving the right. That is that
you cease to respect your enemy, and that is the thing that obliterates
the possibility of an honorable peace.

This is very likely America's intent in the WOT. There seems to be
no question that this Administration wants to give no quarter to
terrorists. Our aim is not an honorable peace with them, but their
total destruction. I think also that American are fairly united in that
sentiment. I believe GWBush's term 'bringing them to justice' is
something of a euphemism. 'Capture or Kill' is more the sentiment, and
my reading of 'capture' absolutely means interrogation to find the rest
of the AQ gang.

It is not entirely clear to me that the sentiment in the current Adminstration is to reach an honorable peace with Al Qaeda, although there are surely people on my side of the aisle who find the President to be an appeaser of the first order. If there is any consequence to the splitting of hairs between citizens who like the current policy over the prior policy (if there is one), it doesn't matter much to Al Qaeda. Then exactly to whom does it matter?

I happen to be skeptical in general but sanguine in particular that probable excess in the liberalization of the use of brutal interrogations will be restrained in our current political environment. Outside of the pacifist principle, I would find it difficult to believe that any nation among our allies would find our brutal interrogations of AQ members to arouse a diplomatic row. They are not afraid America has turned irrevocably for the worse. We are not turning into a police state. We are not making a mockery of our justice system.

All that said, it is clear that our use of this brutal interrogation has exceeded the boundaries apparently set for its preauthorized use. Depending on the nature of the legal machinations invoked to circumvent these rules I would make the call. If, for example, I were to discover that there were some dozen others who were waterboarded in addition to the three captives disclosed, I would call the system into greater question if their interrogations also exceeded the pre-approved guidelines. However if they were waterboarded according to those guidelines set forth, I would have less concern.

That's all I have to say on the matter at this point. I am interested in knowing some example in which my framework of pre-authorized brutal interrogation used like a tool, or a defensive weapon violates some moral immunity given for other weapons of war and in what way.

But I also understand the degree argument and find it respectable. If you simply say that waterboardning, without regard to its effectiveness is simply intolerably brutal I can respectfully disagree. I would say rape or dismemberment is simply intolerably brutal, but not waterboarding. I think it is clear again in the disclosed cases of 266 waterboardings that the guidelines were abused, but I am also relying on a kind of gut measure of proportionality...

April 22, 2009

It has been a while since I've written much personal stuff here at Cobb. A missive from Ambra at Booker Rising reminds me that there remains some currency in that 'stuff white people like' meme. Of course it's not white people but white white people - which is to say self-conscious Americans whose crunchy bourgie sensibilities and relative lack of perspective makes them think that via their consumerist selections and taste, that they are so profoundly different from the rest of humanity. If you think it means something to shop at Whole Foods, then you might be one of them. I am, half the time.

That fraction of me, half or not, wastes hundreds of hours scribbling notes into the ether because I think that what I think should have some permanent resonance. And so I am gladly a member of the Chatting Class of America, which tends to have some sensible distance from the fundaments of survival giving us the confidence that we can waste time if we feel like it. And for the small social rewards, we call ourselves bloggers, pundits etc. It's the ultimate in matrix management - nobody really reports to us and nobody gets in trouble if they defy us. It's actually rather part of the whole intrigue of it. We pretend to matter, we pretend to know. I'm half out of it because I retain a good bit of self-consciousness in all this rot - I have three actual children to raise who do report to me.

These days we are about to run into the complexities of adolescence, which is to say, we parents have to invent a scheme against which the kids can rebel and still remain in our control. Which is to say it's Curfew time. I am writing up a security plan this week, and I will present it via Powerpoint this weekend in preparation for the May 1 rollout. Here is an excerpt.

Universal Rules

1. Always obey the law.
2. Remember that you are a minor. You are not legally an adult. You
have no permission to do adult things. There are no exceptions. Ever.
If you engage in adult behavior, you not only put yourself at risk, you
put your parents and other people at risk. You cannot handle the risk.
Period.
3. Trust is not given. Trust is earned. Trust sometimes. Verify always.4. If you ever have a question, ask your parents, police officer, lifeguard, teacher or coach.5. Fear and distrust are your friends. There is a reason that certain things gross you out. Your instinct is to remain safe. 6. Know your limits. 7. Ask stupid questions. Don't assume you know what's on other people's minds.

Since I live in a stunningly expensive neighborhood full of people who have never kicked been in the groin, some of this seems foolish. It is not. One of the primary mistakes of people in the upper middle class is that they often forget that their relative comfort is not permanent. Sure we all understand that good grades in school lead to acceptance at a better college and a better job and all that, but we forget about earthquakes, floods, terrorist attacks and bank failures. The trick to rising in society is defensive as well as offensive. The point of rising in society is to have society's rules work in your favor. So I never forget that this destination, as chic and comfy as it often seems from my own 'hood sensibilities, is not really a destination. It is a temporary reprieve and a temporary reward. Life is still about struggle.

The matter that eludes many of us is how to shift gears and struggle appropriate to one's circumstances. From my 90016 perspective, it is a lesson that many black Americans, but not only them, most Americans, fail to grasp. Obviously one of the simple lessons is that you don't call things 'white' when they are not. But I understand that's just one of the many failings of American society - we racialize. But what's much more interesting to me is seeing how it is that people construct themselves and comport themselves in social climbing (or rest).

For example. This weekend I did one of those instinctual things I tend to do, which is grab one of my kids and take them out to lunch for a treat. This time, it was with Boy and we went to Hermosa Pier and had Brazilian tri-tip out on the patio witness to the great exuberant parade of half-naked humanity which is Southern California beach culture. We talked about kids he used to hang out with and doesn't any longer. We did some girl watching. We identified who was local and who was not. I introduced the people watching subject from the perspective of girl watching by saying that one of the great benefits of living here is that we get some of the most beautiful girls - it's good to get spoiled so that you don't do foolish things for hot chicks later on in life, and also that he had the built in advantage of good looking sisters, so that he realizes that looks are just looks but character is something else. There is nothing so abjectly sad as a poor sprung boy. He said that this was the greatest place in the world to live. No son, it's not. It's just a place, some rules change when you go elsewhere. Some don't.

Boy, as I mentioned - or maybe didn't - has the capacity for sociopathic behavior. He's one of the rare individuals who in high school can hang out with whichever clique he desires. It's one of his mantras. "I hang out with everybody." Like me, he can have a Martian perspective, his capacity for focus can be scary. But he's good natured and mostly quiet with an easy, and goofy laugh. I have to prepare all of my kids for the ways I think the world will react to them - raised in Southern Cal near the beach and never kicked in the groin. It helps that they're smart - but they are not so single-minded. In fact, that's rather the issue.

Scholar may get a new nickname. She made the cheerleading squad for the high school. The tryouts were last week and she's still an 8th grader, but as an entering freshman she will have reached one of the pinnacles of American popular culture. Or stereotypes. Scholar just recently did a fairly awesome production for her Democracy in Action project getting people from about six or seven different organizations to respond to her requests for information and educational materials about the Giant Panda. When it comes to such projects, she can fill binders with the quickness. And when she quizzed people at her table, she cut the profile of what I imagine the great doyennes of philanthropy look like. She looked very model teen, the kind with the great smile without the aid of braces. She has never had a problem speaking with adults, despite her typical, like, teenage speech patterns. And I see in her, social power blossoming.

These two are my focus because they're getting to the point at which some focus is required on their part. All of their lives they have had the smorgasbord. And this is what they have become, busy, busy, busy. Up until 10pm because today was theatre rehearsal. I'm wary of the levelling that privilege gives all variety of activities. Soccer, gymnastics, junior guards, Scouts, youth group, honors classes. It's all a surfeit of blessings and something about it makes me uneasy. So I always joke about the big house and land we'll get when we move to Alabama - away from all this. Still, I know that's wrong. We need to be with people, the most people, the sophisticated people - because everything in society comes from people not from nature.

So on this Earth Day, my attitude is that it's all superstition. Turning off lights doesn't make you a better person. But I guess I have to steer my family and put out my crusty old man vibe so they can hear it - that I will build them a way to interact with as many people as possible and to keep themselves relatively clean and safe. Let them people-watch and evaluate character, the critical skill you can't get from pigs and chickens, trees and mountains. This will be part of my gift - to get them out there in the midst of the millions in society from this springboard of competence and privilege so that they can manage themselves, manage risk, manage time, and manage the intricacies of society from the side of those who can not only hang out with everyone, but lead.

I remember how they used to joke back at me at breakfast when I told them to take over the world. Like I was Brain of Pinkey and the Brain. And so I reminded them that they will have plenty opportunity to watch the character of their schoolmates and to try and make better choices based on the values we hold in Daddy's House. Sprite, still only 12, reminded us in prayer on Easter about our good fortune to have a close extended family when she knows so many who don't have both parents at home.

My sympathies go out to Joe, who has to speak about civil rights on a panel with some crusty old sit-in veterans. Where I am in this America is in the upper middle class where civil rights just don't get violated - where there are a great deal more subtle currents to monitor. MLK talked about the mountaintop of the middle class, but I'm dealing with the aerodynamics of the winds above the mountains. For now, my kids are high fliers and their wings are steady and growing stronger. This is the constant challenge of being the kind of dad I am, where sometimes having your feet on solid ground doesn't help at all.

So I remind myself of the basics and work not to get caught up in the moment. I only wash the car once a month and retain the Old School. I thought about trading in the BMW for a truck and realized it's past time. So I'll drive it into the ground. I'm remembering that there are still things worth picking out at the Goodwill store, even though we are net contributors by a large margin. I'm remembering that in the long sweep of history that Enrons disappear and Googles appear but the human body remains the same - still glad I can remember matters of haploid and diploid, solar flares and the area of a triangle. Whatever the social skills of my crew, some rules never change and that's where their knowledge must derive. But they will be competent to lead people back around to those central matters. That is my hope.

So far so good. We may go broke in the next year or two - it's anybody's guess in this economy. But so far, in the lower third of the upper middle class, life is good. Very good.

April 21, 2009

The number in my head was three. That's the number of bad guys that were waterboarded. Today it's 266. That's the number times that two of the bad guys were waterboarded according to the news all over the news. The most detailed of the details are evidently still in the hands of bloggers. Emptywheel is the source of analysis that losers of the sort the New Yorker hires are unable to effect.

Dick Cheney has stared Obama down with a challenge to answer the question that his inquiry provokes, "Is it worth it?", by releasing the rest of the documents at CIA. Basically Obama has only addressed the politically provocative side, which is over the question of legality. It is clear that the number of waterboarding exceed the guidelines for the practice according to Emptywheel; it begs the question "why?" Of course the answer to the question is obvious, depending on what side you're on. If you showed symptoms of BDS the answer is neatly summed up by Andrew Sullivan.

The point is to exert total absolute control over another human being -
and to break that human being into as many pieces - physical,
psychological, spiritual - as possible. This breaking of another human
being is what Cheney wanted; it is what gave him a sense of control
after he had presided over the worst attack in American history. Even
though the victim had nothing more to tell, the torture had to go on
and on - in part to generate data to justify the torture. Can you
imagine what it felt like to put Zubaydah on the waterboard
the seventieth time, knowing he had nothing more to say, knowing he was
the wrong guy?

Yes of course we have to imagine, because the results of the interrogation remain classified. Cheney on the other hand says to Obama show the results side of the equation you sanctimonious wimp. By the way 'sanctimonius wimp' is one of the best insults I've heard thrown against Obama. Nails him. Hat tip to Jules Crittenden who quotes Cheney:

“One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is they put out the legal memos, the memos that the CIA got from the Office of Legal Counsel, but they didn’t put out the memos that showed the success of the effort. And there are reports that show specifically what we gained as a result of this activity. They have not been declassified.”

“I formally asked that they be declassified now. I haven’t announced this up until now, I haven’t talked about it, but I know specifically of reports that I read, that I saw that lay out what we learned through the interrogation process and what the consequences were for the country.”

“And I’ve now formally asked the CIA to take steps to declassify those memos so we can lay them out there and the American people have a chance to see what we obtained and what we learned and how good the intelligence was, as well as to see this debate over the legal opinions.”

So either Obama has to end his puffery allowing his drones a couple days to run to listen to Sullivan and the New Yorker and Jon Stewart or some patriots at the CIA are going to be sorely tempted to start leaking. This is, finally, the entire cat out of the bag. Now that Obama has played this much of the hand he must be about full transparency and go along with Cheney or be about political gamesmanship in which he gets to show that Bush broke the rules, leave why open to crude speculation, and cover up the results in the interests of national security. Then say, hey we're not going to prosecute anybody formally, we're just using this evidence to flay our predecessors in public - to let 'the world' know.

But we're all capable of savagery. In that regard, there is no
difference between 'us' and 'them'. We all retain the essence of our
humanity which allows us to kill at all. No one suggests that we not
kill the enemy. The difference lies in what our systems are constructed
to do and how they perform when called into duty. The difference lies
in the quality of the cage in which our monsters reside during the off
season. The difference lies in the willingness to look, to see, to
judge and to act when monstrous subjects are at hand. These are not
differences made real by the existence of a Geneva Convention, but
differences made real by the structure and behavior of the US military
and its civilian oversight.

Obama wants to pretend that these are not his tools and that the world that hates America was right for 8 years. Disclose or be delusional.

I've looked at America from both sides now and I can't decide which side to choose because I live here. Aside from all that, I think that if I were a bit more honest (and if everyone were) I'd admit that what annoys me about Americans annoys me about everyone. Most liberals who talk about how stupid conservatives are merely mask their contempt for humanity. That's the political way of saying it from the right side of the fence. You see I had to say it that way because it was losing my contempt for the American Middle Class that was part of my conversion from Left to Right. But I could imagine that the things I can't stand about stupid liberals is several parts misanthropy.

There's a lot to explain in that but I was reminded very much of that sort of intellectual class warfare yesterday at the Long Beach Gran Prix.

I got together with some of my gamer buds, and I expected some of my professional buds to show up as well. None of the professionals showed up, lots of the gamers did and there wasn't much of a middle ground. It's hard for me to say what that middle ground might be. But put it this way. I had black chinos, a silk mock turtle and some Eccos in the trunk for the dinner at The Madison. Nobody showed up for that group. For the bulk of the day however, it was fatigue cargo shorts and tire-tread boots with a beer in the left hand. Easy for me, easy for the gamer gang.

After the day at the races when it was time for the rock concert featuring Puddle of Mudd, I knew it was time for me to head home. I had a blast of a day which included public drunkenness. I can count the number of times I've been intoxicated outside during the day. As of yesterday that would be two. The other time I don't remember, but I'm just saying two in case I do finally remember the other time. Oh wait. Danita W. back when I was 26. What a pool party that was. Oh yeah and the greek picnic at Cheviot Hills Park. Well, all of that was 1987, so whatever. I haven't been that kind of homeboy for a long time, but I'm not hating those who are. I've just been living my kind of sophisticated life for many years and I can't remember the last time I thought it was funny to attach a piece of toilet paper to somebody's back pocket and make sure that the girls in tanktops were watching us clown our buddy. That's one taste of the kind of fun I had at the Gran Prix.

So I kinda wondered if my professional buds knew something about the Long Beach Gran Prix that I didn't know - which is why they all had previous engagements. Of course there is always the probability which I never exclude which is that I'm just annoying company and I have no very close, regular friends for a good reasons one of which is the very kind of overanalysis that occupies me writing this very essay at 8 on a Sunday evening. But the same kind of restraint that doesn't get drunk won't let me say that outright.

Still, you have to admit, even if you are a gearhead as I unabashedly am, that there is something very amusement park-ish to this event. Since I had a general admission pass and didn't quite find my way to a reserved, shaded, catered seat (many of which were empty) I had to put on the dark shades and ball cap like the rest of the horde. To what end? To watch cars go fast. To hear cars get loud. To eat hot links and drink beer. To check out the grid girls. To stroll through the exhibits and say "Whoa dude, check this out!". To stand open mouthed as young men on dirtbikes flipped them sideway in midair. To put my hands on the tires of drift cars which an hour earlier were 220 degrees hot and tracing smoking spirals of burning rubber on the streets of Long Beach. To swear to myself that one day I'm going to Bondurant. To think to myself that I would be a better driver than Raven Symone and that if I were a celebrity, I'd definitely get into this race. To wonder how fast that incredibly deep roar coming from the Panoz Esperante is pushing the matte black racer.

I'm standing in the parking structure at the north end of the course leaning into that flows over the concrete wall two floors up. The security guard 100 yards south of me doesn't see me or my buds - we came up through the service entrance trying to get a view of turn 9. We're at the back straight just before the braking markers count off the feet 300, 200, 100 that the cars will negotiate in split seconds. We're right at the point where they let off the gas and apply the brakes and the engines pop backfires as loud as anti-aircraft rounds. The cars bounce off the bumps and hang a right and accellerate away, but the extraordinary noise coming through the tunnel under the convention center and echoing off concrete canyon between the parking structure and the high rise apartments is astonishing. It's hard to believe such a ruckus can come from something that size. But it keeps coming, car after car during the qualifying runs for the Indy race. There's Danica Patrick in the black Motorola car. We are all taxing the chips of our cellphones and digital cameras. There's no way to capture the speed, the roar, the chest cavity vibrations. I call my son who is 100 miles east at Lake Arrowhead with his Scout troop to leave him an explosive voice mail. He actually picks up. He asks incredulously, "Are those cars?".

Over in the arena is the BMX show. There is a man named Mike Metzger who has the microphone and he is talking about his life. His life is jumping motorcycles and he is one of the best in the world. And he has a Hollywood promoter and a crew of freestyle motorcycle and bmx jumpers and a band called Day Zero behind him. He can't stop talking about the fact that he broke his back and has 3 fused vertabrae. He loves Jesus and he wants to be the absolute best. He tells us we should do the same. Go fast or go home. For two years he could do nothing, but now he's back. His crew is risking life and limb for the thrill and the roar of the crowd. He is extreme personified. He has the world record for the longest backflip on a motorcycle - over the fountains at Ceasar's Palace. The band cranks it up in the style of POD, hard Christian rock about values and achievement and they start flying their machines through the air. It's the church of the flipping dirtbike with its apostles of orthopaedic trauma, and every time they sail off the ramp 30 feet above your head you hold your breath. And they land it. And they're pushing beyond what anybody you know could ever do, and suddenly ladies on elephants and men on tightropes all seem idiotically stupid. This is what daredevils really do, and they are so close to death and dismemberment that they pray in public.

In the lobby of the convention center is set of boring hybrid vehicles. A man in a pale blue work shirt dusts them off with a long chamois brush. People walk through barely turning their heads as they make the trip over to the Patrón Añejo bar. One of the major sponsors is Patrón Spirits. I know about Gray Goose, but I had no idea there was an equivalent tequila. Not until Friday did the term Patrón penetrate my noggin until I saw this video. And all at once that little asshole in my head starts telling me that this is not a classy scene.

Over in the bar, the bartender enlists me and my buds to get his back. His name is Jeremiah and he tells me that the place gets really crazy on Saturday night, and guess what, it's Saturday night. So when he tells some jaggoff that he's had enough to drink that we should back him up, okay? Sure. I'm naturally there. I break up fights, it's a big brother instinct. The chick next to me is impressed. "Hey, you've been deputized", she slurs. Except that my buds and I are already ordering up Tecates, I've had two Jack & Cokes and now we're ordering shots of Patrón. Fifty bucks for the five of us. A toast to a new daughter born four days ago. We are the change we are expected to defend against. After a fourth bathroom break, we head back into the sun, but I was wearing my sunglasses and ball cap inside already. After the BMX show we had an hour to drink before the Le Mans race, and now we are thoroughly toasted in the toasty sun. We amble around and get split up somehow, get back together after the race and have more beers. Right about now it's time to clown. I didn't realize that I was supposed to drink this much until it's too late, and I'm kinda mad at myself for not buying more drinks for the gang.

By the time the entire joint is breaking up in preparation for the concert, everything is funny. I buy a giant sausage with peppers in a french roll and laugh at everybody. I gotta get out of here, but I've got to take the bus back to Belmont Shores three miles away where I parked. I send my regrets to the fellas by text and fall asleep on the bus which is swelled with more loud people in expensive sunglasses and short sleeve shirts. After my own 90 mph blitz up the 710 freeway, I get home to my XBox and run a couple virtual laps in Grid. I'm completely exhausted. I've been on my feet all day only sitting on the two bus trips and in the bar. Unlike a trip to Magic Mountain, I don't retain any deja vus of vertigo, and there is nothing that can recreate the sounds of motorsports in my head. I turn up the volume on the stereo hooked up to the big screen. The effect is unimpressive. I search to see if my DVR captured any of what I actually saw - nothing yet. I download a cellphone and an camera's worth of images. OK now I'm sober. I realize there is no way to capture it. You've got to go there. You've got to be there. And now that I wasn't there any longer I knew I was missing out.

I'm trying to guess what is the demographic for motorsports in the US. It's not important, really because everybody has their own reasons for enjoying it. Still, you cannot be any sort of American and not know the prejudices against NASCAR race fans or drag race fans or lowrider fans or Harley fans or monster truck fans or BMX fans. Even here at Long Beach which is primarily an Indy Car event, I started talking smack about the fact that there's more than just left turns on this course. In fact, one of my professional buds did actually ditch me for a date at a NASCAR race - or at least that's what he told me. The American LeMans is the closest we have to the class act of the sport, F1. If Long Beach has any brains, they'll bring back F1 and maybe the Rolex Series as well. There are more than enough people here in LA to pack this venue and there is something for everybody - even if you just pull your yacht up for the weekend.

I've had an odd kind of thrill this weekend which is the pure adrenaline rush of racing against the intellectual prejudice against people who dig pure adrenaline rushes. I'm definitely a gearhead and I definitely will return next year. I'll know exactly what to expect. I'm on the side of the motorsports. Yeah for the extreme competence and the raw competition - for the noise and the power. All that is just like airshows. But I'll also come for the beer and the brats, for the cigars and the ogling, for the boyish clowning and the walking around dazed. For the crowds and the circus and knowing that it's just fun for the sake of fun - for forgetting about the economy and the geopolitics. For the NOS drinks and the NOS Girls. That's weekend in Long Beach I can do every year.

April 20, 2009

The other day I was thinking about Sammy Davis Jr. It was because of
a scene from Transporter 3 in which Jason Statham has a conversation
with his onscreen buddy about Jerry Lewis vs Dean Martin. The moment
made me think about how unfortunate we are to have only George Clooney
and Brad Pitt. As I go through my inventory of talented entertainers
only I can only think of Prince as multi-talented. Or perhaps Tommy
Tune. The point is that nobody comes close to Sammy, and there are no
American men I can think of who, like those in the Rat Pack + Hugh
Hefner might by their presence and talent transform the degraded state
of American manhood and style from its trajectory towards the
aesthetics of Hulk Hogan. It's no wonder people idolize Barack Obama.
He's got no competition.

I love Bruce Willis, but he actually has
ruined it for the American film star. I love Daniel Craig as the new
James Bond as well, but all of these guys are way too hard. What are we
going to do? We have to buy Transporter 3 and watch Jason Statham as
well and wait until perhaps Hugh Laurie makes a film. Until then, there
will continue to be people in the movie business who get paid to handle
facial scar continuity as our men in film bounce from explosion to
explosion.

This has everything to do with Susan Boyle because her
presence in a reality show demonstrates how little our star system
deals with real talent. What we are stuck with is an entire class of
celebrities who possess a little bit of everything and a giant chunk of
nothing. That is, except on the margins. On the margins where talent
still counts for everything we have a broad pool of insufferable
savants. Race car drivers, for example, and young men who can flip
motorcycles or snowboards 360 degrees in the air in the space between
ramps. They are excellent to be watched, but not heard. Boyle is the
opposite, she has, as they say, a face for radio. Excellent to be heard
but not watched. And most singular talent is like that, singular. There
are no CEOs in AIG who can stand in front of a camera and explain their
value to a Congressional subcommittee, they just do what they do. There
are no basketball or baseball stars who can articulate the style of
their mansions or luxury cars. Let them just play ball. There are no
counterterrorism experts who can get on the radio and explain exactly
under what circumstances they work, passing a politically tractionable
message to the masses. They just do what they do. We all, most of us,
struggle mightily to do the thing that butters our bread as best we can
- we don't have time to also look good doing it. Then of course there
is that class of people who spend all their energy so that they can
look good doing anything. These are the people who own our sense of
talent, which is why Susan Boyle surprised everyone.

Susan Boyle
inspired everyone because we all wish that talent will reward, and we
all pray that our meritocracy finds all of the rough diamonds in time.
We know that we suffer from a surfiet of mediocre multi-talent and from
the stranglehold of the celebrated elite. As much as we actually do
love Jeopardy's Alex Trebek, we shouldn't have to watch him in a
celebrity sports car race. The man is 68 years old. There is no reason
whatsoever that we should put up with Regis Philbin any longer. He
already holds the Guinness Book record for most time in front of a
television camera. Let go. We don't need presenters being presentable.
We need the producers to produce.

If we could let the singers
sing and the dancers dance, then maybe we can let people be respected
for their talent rather than just making respectable appearances. Maybe
we can let people be what they truly are knowing that in at least one
way they are valuable in our society.

Instead we pretend that
the crippled are not crippled and that through the artifice of language
and tact that everybody's beautiful in the same way. We pretend that
the weird are not weird, and that there's always a way to smooth over
defects and make them all acceptable. We affirm. To affirm is to make true, and we live in an Era of Affirmation, and yet we know it's false. This is why we Americans crave
reality shows, because we know at bottom that it can't all be true - we
need to exercise judgment in a society that has gone too affirmative
for its own good. We know that there are three judges on American Idol,
but we know that only one really counts.

One day among our children we will see an entertainer who can sing
and dance and act and look good while doing it all, because she
actually can. And she will put Madonna, Paris, Britney, Lindsay and the
rest of their ilk to shame. She will be Lena Horne reborn. And she will
shame us all for putting up with their mediocrity for all this time.
She will end debate. When she comes we'll all be a lot better off
because then we'll know that be high standards our politicians can't
dance their way out, our bankers can't act their way out, our teachers can't sing their way out and all of the people who are failing and trying to look respectable while doing so will have no cover. The era of affirmation will cease.

Until that day we will be reminded smartly that only the talent of having a pretty face has a pretty face, and that for the most part talent is singular. That Joe the Plumber is not a political commentator, that Barney Frank is not a banker, that Caroline Kennedy is only Caroline Kennedy, that Sarah Palin is only Sarah Palin; that things are only what they are and that no amount of affirmation can make them more. Let us recognize things as they are.

April 17, 2009

I don't spend a lot of time talking about boys and girls here at Cobb, but I'm at about that point in my career as a father when I will have to as a matter of course. I haven't spoken much about abortion here either. It's obviously a fruitful topic. But I want to set a direction here and I'm taking a cue from Mirror of Justice. Them say:

First, Christians in general have been much more outspoken about SSM
than about non-SSM threats to the sanctity of marriage. Last summer I
spoke to a group of conservative evangelical Christians about SSM, and
this is the image I used to convey the GLBT community's distrust of
Christians on this issue:

Imagine that marriage is a house, and the Christian is sitting on
the front porch. The house is engulfed in flames. A gay person is
walking down the sidewalk, lighting a cigarette with a match. The
Christian stands up and yells, "Hey, don't throw your match near my
house -- that's a fire hazard!" Viewing the scene, the gay person
can't help but conclude: "This isn't about marriage. This is about me."

Second, over the past fifty years, very few Christians
have taken leadership roles in condemning obvious injustices against
the GLBT community.

If I haven't said it before, I think there's something radically wrong with boyfriends or girlfriends that hang around in 'relationships' for years although I will admit that it's more radically wrong for young people. I think that the idea that marriage offers nothing more is the primary cause for the preponderance of these strange affairs, and yes I want to get into that from my own arrogant perspective. Although I don't listen to morning radio I've heard enough of the advice shows to know that there's a big market out there for 'relationships'. Me, I like Lykis and Dr. Laura. They are on different sides of the same coin. Lykis slams young people who slide down the slippery slope of live-in relationships and Laura slams wedded people who can't keep their heads on straight about the rules and the consequence of breaking them. Both are in their own way very pro-marriage. They establish a high standard by debunking every half-assed and failing relationship that people rationalize their ways into.

In my defense of marriage and these standards I do not do so to revile those who don't. I will talk smack about you just as I would people who have no sense of style. I will cop a superior attitude when it suits me. I may be above making anything out of it, but I am not above thinking it and I do believe it's reasonable to make social hay out of such. Still there is the formal definition of hubris which is the arrogance to punish people who are already failing. This is what I don't do. I note the failure and I move on. You will notice at Cobb that I don't spend a lot of time talking about relationships and all that. But in this regard, that is to say the extent to which respect for marriage itself and the actions required in preparation for marrying well affect the behavior of single men and women, I do think there is much to be said.

I'm not sure how much causality there is in marrying well when it comes to the Old School project. It's certainly significant but I don't know how much. So I'm not sure whether it's a big deal to talk about it politically.

Yes. Tom Lykis and Dr. Laura are two sides of the same coin and they're both right. However since I am admittedly not a 'social conservative' I don't feel any obligation to be the kind of scold both of them are. But what troubles the proper Christian vis a vis MoJ's recognition of this default by Christians forces us into a defensive position. I'm not defensive, really. I have very strong ideas about what a proper marriage should be and it is informed by a great deal and initiated by the fact that my Catholic schooling forced me to reckon with it on a moral basis at an early age, which was admittedly strong negatives about the sins and little championing of the positive.

That leaves us with something of a dilemma. Right now I think I know how to split the difference but I am eager to see how the proper Catholic deals with it. You see I am convinced that there in an extrinsic sin in some homosexuality which is identical to hetero promiscuity. It is, quite simply, promiscuity. So splitting the difference, I think there may ultimately be some blessing of homosexual union, and I believe that it comes from somewhere in the social negotiation.

So do I think that there is some fraction of Christian love in gay sex? There has got to be, somewhere. And although I'm tempted to say "you're asking the wrong person", I could absolutely see that there is the homosexual man who does not believe in pre-marital sex, is saving himself for the right person and wants with all his heart to be blessed by the church. There is certainly some dispensation for that man within the body of Christ. But how the Church woks that out is all in the details. Again, we're faced with a lot of negative presumptions about homosexuality which are difficult to disentangle from the reality of any individual, and the Church shouldn't be presumptive but clear and firm.

To wrap this up and be clear, I've always said that the best case scenario is that the society should work out 'the rules' for homosexual relationships in such a way that the mainstream has a moral intelligence about them. I feel that the Church has some forward role in this process and can do things that the State & Hollywood cannot and should not.

April 16, 2009

I don't know his real name, but I expect to find out. I'll learn it and remember it, but maybe I'll forget it again. I'll never forget his gamertag, his handle, his legend. his ID in the system that brought us together. It was FastlaneKen. I'll never forget his voice. It was deep and jocular. He was a driver and a shooter like me. He was married and had a daughter. He lived in San Diego, but I only recently found out about that. We talked about F1 racing and things automotive in our chatrooms and lobbies. We talked about everything and nothing. We will no longer speak, and it really hurts.

There are about a dozen of us young and middle aged men, and there's an old man who draws us together. We are not named but if you had to give is a name that we've accepted as our own when we bothered to try, it was the Cult of Sun Tzu. I'm not sure what my character is in the cast, I'm sometimes skillful and I can sometimes get the gang to laugh, and I can rant with the best of them. We've been together online in the world of XBOX Live for about five years. We have a bond of friendship. Hanging out and gaming with these men (and one woman occasionally), has been the closest thing I've come to what I imagine its like to being a bar regular.

I have been online since the days when that was an extraordinary privilege, and I have come to know many people through that context. Maybe once a year, I will meet somebody in person that I have known online for many years. There are still many whom I have known 5, 10 and even 15 years online that I have never yet met face to face. And of course there are hundreds of people who know me directly or indirectly from the various places I've sojourned online all these many years. But online writing is one thing - you never get to hear people's voices. Online gaming is much more immersive and personal.

My gaming buddies know my voice and my sense of humor. They know my gaming skills and whether or not I play fair. We've gone many places together in the worlds of racing and shooting. And this weekend a handful of us were scheduled to meet in person - for me for the first time. Some of us will make it to the Long Beach Gran Prix, but one will be sorely missed.

He is a man I knew only in a certain way. Gaming is an odd way to get to know somebody, but in my generation, the ethic of pickup sports is still strong. The ritual of pickup basketball and football is deep with me. So I knew him like I know a player at the regular courts.

The past couple weeks Fastlane was in high spirits. He had just added another motorcycle to his collection. A brand new Ducati 1198. He rode it up this way from San Diego for the Fontana races a few weeks ago. I missed him that weekend but even changed my laptop wallpaper to that bike. We're gearheads in the Cult of Sun Tzu, always talking about cars and software and cellphone plans. Superbike racing was just another angle. I didn't get out to Fontana but I watched that show on the Speed Channel was disappointed in the quality and ordered the full HD upgrade from Verizon so I could get Speed HD. F1 season just started and I wanted to get this season right.

It was probably April 4, the last time I spoke with him. We were playing something of a retro game Rainbow Six Vegas, the original up, until midnight when we got sloppy with sleep. It was an exercise in nostalgia for the four of us, the most mature of the Cult, as we got together several nights that week and played maps we hadn't seen in years. We went to the little town in Mexico, to the dam in Nevada, to the Chinese casino, to the Library.

My online avatar cannot wear a black armband. There's no black suit for me to put on and I cannot put a memorial plaque in any of the maps. If I could, there would be one for Fastlane in PGR4 or Moto GP. A tile at Mugello or perhaps at Deux Ponts in Paris on the wall of the final turn. I'll think about him when I'm prowling the theatre at Dante's Casino or playing Cat and Mouse at Nurburgring. It's going to be different from now on. The lobby just won't be the same.

As a kid, I hated insurance. I think there is something vital and visceral in young people, especially young men who ride motorcycles, that feels instinctively hostile to people who live in relative comfort emboldened by their ability to price risky behavior in people.

If I could reduce insurance to a very brief definition, it is just that - the business of putting a dollar value on life, and thus on the risks that human beings take.

My man David Goldman is talking about the soundness of the insurance business in this economic crisis. If there is a single industry that's even bigger than banking and more central to the functioning of our capitalist economy it is insurance. That's not only for the job that insurance does in making jagged edges smooth for investments, but for the fact that insurance companies hold a great deal of banking assets.

--

I've lost the thread of this thought which was going somewhere else interesting other than the simple provocation of why socialists and the left love insurance but they refuse to accept its capitalist elements.

You see a friend of mine died in a motorcycle crash this week. I don't know for certain if he was insured, but I think it's a safe bet. What's a safe bet? That's the whole point. Managing risk, putting a number on it, putting a dollar value on it. I'm emotional about it now but the bottom line will still be the bottom line - how does the widow survive? It's always a question of prudent investment.

April 15, 2009

Phil Spector was found guilty of murder yesterday. Another man who drove deadly drunk into the car containing star athletes from the Angels was charged with second degree murder yesterday as well.

Every day I forget how much crime goes on. Every day I forget how difficult it is to solve crimes, how much effort goes into that constant battle against it. It's a sobering thought. Some days when I wonder about the economy, I always try to remember how basic and fundamental it is that we will always have jobs that cannot be outsourced and whose importance is permanent.

I don't know Phil Spector at all. The associations in my mind are tenuous. I don't see a face. I only know 'Wall of Sound', 'The Supremes' and 'Murder'. I don't know the name of any of his songs, I don't even know if he is a songwriter or a producer or an ex-band member of some band I should know. I'm quite likely to leave it that way. The more I know about Phil Spector as a murderer, the more I know about the reality that matters.

I don't know the name of the Angel's ball player that died in the car wreck. But I make sure that my kids hear me cursing at idiot drivers whenever we are in the car together. It's the biggest risk I share with them, and they oughta know how scary it can be.

I hear that one of the crew of the Maersk Alabama incapacitated a would be pirate with an ice-pick. The pirate had an AK-47. People are right not to focus on the car, the ice-pick or whatever it is that Spector used in his atrocity. It's the man that counts. Sometimes we have to ask ourselves if we are men enough to deal with these wayward men.

A couple weeks ago, March 27th to be exact, I made something of a fool of myself in front of Doc's new girl. To make a point about discipline, I stood up in the conversation we were having and started swinging my arms like a girl in a catfight. That, I said, will never be a martial art and no martial artist will ever lose a fight to a raging fool, no matter how incredible their rage. Swinging your arms in a rage is dangerous, but the proper man will take you out in a fight, like Indiana Jones famously did.

'Never ever' is hyperbole to underscore the point that we should never ever think that the rage of adversaries overrules our thoughtful discipline. This should be a caution to the Right in support of the sort of temperance our fellow citizens, so full of hope, are wanting to demonstrate these days. We could destroy the ports of Somalia because we have accumulated over the decades, an unrivaled military sophistication. All the discipline that is the Pentagon lies ready to spring into action, because we haven't been, by and large, foolishing swinging our arms like Kim Jong-Il.

Terrorists and other latrunculi swing wildly. A strategic Systems Administrative force on global deployment is our discipline. We are the world's policeman, and we need to get our patrol cars out there and ready for all the geopolitical slow speed chases to come, with discipline.

Case in point: All of this bureaucratic reorganizing at the Pentagon coincided with our Navy's slow-motion (but ultimately elegant) rescuing of a ship from Somali pirates. Eventually, we sent in a destroyer with enough firepower to lay waste to everything of value in Somalia, and yet the endgame consisted of SEAL snipers dispatching of three teenagers who arguably never had a chance for any better outcome in life.

At the end of the day, then, our government needs to ask itself if the new defense budget moves America closer to or further away from the world as we find it evolving. As somebody who's argued for many years about "downshifting" the Pentagon's strategic perspective — and resources — from large conflicts to small ("system administration," as I like to call it), Gates turns out to be the seminal figure I hoped he would become. Assuming his continued success, he arguably goes down as President Obama's most influential first-term cabinet pick.

Why? This Gates-led rebalancing constitutes only the second such momentous shift in American history. Prior to World War I, our military was configured primarily for small wars — namely, the Indian wars of our westward expansion. Since World War II, American forces have been used overwhelmingly in small-war situations, even as our budgetary bias toward the big-war force remained unchallengeable. Until now, that is.

The Systems Admininstration force is the right kind of force for America. It means a General Honore in every corner of the world in armed conflict and post-disaster chaos where the US has an opportunity and an interest in stability.

April 14, 2009

The Democratic People´s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has today informed IAEA
inspectors in the Yongbyon facility that it is immediately ceasing all
cooperation with the IAEA. It has requested the removal of all containment and
surveillance equipment, following which, IAEA inspectors will no longer be
provided access to the facility. The inspectors have also been asked to leave
the DPRK at the earliest possible time.

The DPRK also informed the IAEA that it has decided to reactivate all facilities
and go ahead with the reprocessing of spent fuel.

So I guess I was just lucky in my guess here, neh? Hey, let's just imagine that Kim Jong-Il is not paying attention to Obama's smiling and bowing and quiet diplomacy with Iran. Like I said. Today's mouse is tomorrow's menace.

For the deskbound academic who does not work on a ocean-going container
ship, history’s pirate can be a Robin-Hood redistributionist who takes
from the mercantile class and spreads booty to the poor; or he is
anarchist who defies the bourgeoisie norms of an oppressive society; or
he is a sexual libertine—a cross-dresser, a sexually ambiguous
Steppenwolf, a polymorphously perverse rebel, who has said no to the
straightjacket of heterosexual norms; or he is an egalitarian who
constructs an alternate “pirate community” that is without racial,
gender, and class bias. There are all sorts of noble Jewish, black, and
female pirates in academic discourse, far better folk that the British
navy that tried to stamp them out.

April 13, 2009

I'm a philosophical kind of person, and I often find myself describing things according to my own evolved understanding with very precise language. If I didn't know me any better I would consider some of it contrived- it sure doesn't sound like how I grew up speaking, around the way in 90016. But it does serve a purpose which is as a stepping stone towards a perfecting wisdom. It's not easy which is why I appreciate history and its accumulated wisdoms. History for me includes the history of morality which means the history of the church. And since I understand information theory, I recognize the institution of the church vis a vis its ability to keep moral wisdom alive, and the necessity of theology and ecclesiastical studies in keeping that ability alive.

[Stanley] Fish is absolutely correct: conscience is not a self-contained "black
box" -- it is an inherently self-transcendent set of moral claims. But
that does not invariably mean that the exercise of conscience must lead
to some "public" establishment of conscience's substance. Fish seems
to assume that the alternative to an individualized conscience is a
state-established conscience, and it leads him to this rather sinister
rationale for condemning the Bush regulations:

..an inherently self-transcendent set of moral claims. Sounds like Fish and his critics do the same thing with language I do. It's good to have company - which is rather the point all parties are making about the nature of conscience. Break it up. If 'science' is knowing and a process of discovery, then conscience is that *with* others. You conscience is a joint creation and it acts on you individually. Your conscience reflects the understanding of a greater moral plurality - something shared with something bigger than you. You develop conscience in collaboration.

Where the MoJ writer and Fish diverge has to do with the materiality and proper form of that bigger something. Fish seems to locate it in the State, MoJ obviously in God. There are more than simply religious reasons to distrust the moral capacities of the State, and one need only take a short tour around George Orwell to recognize that.

I like the idea that conscience is not your own - that it is a state of internalization of self-transcendent morality. That angel and that devil on your opposite shoulders aren't you - they don't have your face. A man with a troubled conscience is not struggling with himself, but he is struggling to keep the deal he has already made with a self-transcendent moral power. That's deep.

April 12, 2009

Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea. What happens next? Now that at two American crews have been attacked by pirates off the Horn of Africa, it has become the focus of attention. What is the proper role of America in establishing stability and security in that area of the world? What should we expect to happen? Who are the players, and what, if any, difference does Obama make?

At Cobb we've had special focus on that area surrounding the work and positions of Jendayi Frazer. I think that if Obama continues the general thrust of the Bush Administration via Frazer, that we're on the right track, but that he must step up his commitment to crackdown on piracy. There's a lot to discuss. Let's get it under way.

April 11, 2009

“This is the one Church of Christ which in the Creed is professed as
one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, which our Savior, after his
Resurrection, commissioned Peter to shepherd, and him and the other
apostles to extend and direct with authority, which he erected for all
ages as ‘the pillar and mainstay of the truth.’ This Church,
constituted and organized in the world as a society, subsists in the
Catholic Church, which is governed by the successor of Peter and by the
Bishops in communion with him, although many elements of sanctification
and of truth are found outside of its visible structure. These
elements, as gifts belonging to the Church of Christ, are forces
impelling toward catholic unity.”

Catholic unity.

Catholic unity around the pillar and mainstay of the truth. That's pretty heavy. I like it.

April 10, 2009

[Last] Friday afternoon, the Obama DOJ filed the government's first response to EFF's lawsuit
(.pdf), the first of its kind to seek damages against government
officials under FISA, the Wiretap Act and other statutes, arising out
of Bush's NSA program. But the Obama DOJ demanded dismissal of the entire lawsuit
based on (1) its Bush-mimicking claim that the "state secrets"
privilege bars any lawsuits against the Bush administration for illegal
spying, and (2) a brand new "sovereign immunity" claim of breathtaking
scope -- never before advanced even by the Bush administration -- that
the Patriot Act bars any lawsuits of any kind for illegal government
surveillance unless there is "willful disclosure" of the illegally intercepted communications.

In
other words, beyond even the outrageously broad "state secrets"
privilege invented by the Bush administration and now embraced fully by
the Obama administration, the Obama DOJ has now invented a brand new
claim of government immunity, one which literally asserts that the U.S.
Government is free to intercept all of your communications (calls,
emails and the like) and -- even if what they're doing is blatantly
illegal and they know it's illegal -- you are barred from suing them
unless they "willfully disclose" to the public what they have learned.

It basically boils down to the Obama Administration invoking Section 223 of the Patriot Act, which Congress has decided not to sunset. I think the term is "Sovereign Immunity", which basically means that if you don't like what the government is doing, even if the government itself thinks it might be illegal, you cannot sue the government unless it blatantly publicizes its findings.

Obama has walked himself into a corner because there is no terminology left for him vis a vis the War On Terror that he hasn't denigrated. So there's really no consistent term of security in his policy that gives a political explanation for the powers he has reverved for the executive. Not so much as an 'evildoer'.

As I listened to Dan Carlin break this story on his podcast, an image flashed in my eyes. You know that envelope that one president leaves for another? I'm imagining that Bush put in that envelope some wiretap information on a domestic terror cell that was found by pushing the FISA envelope - something so heinous and devastating that Obama could not ignore it and give him no grounds to question the means of intelligence gathering. After all, now Obama knew what Bush knew so what could he do?

My solution to all this remains twofold as I've said. An American equivalent of MI5 whose charter is domestic surveillance in the first place, not some patchwork of broken firewalls between agencies who would heretofore only be breaking their charters by doing such work. Secondly a terrorism circuit court as suggested by Posner. Doing this would allow Congress to sunset the Patriot Act and put more power into the judicial branch which should alleviate the envelope pushing.

Greenwald and a host of others cannot imagine and believe that Obama is actually going further that Bush ever did in asserting the untouchability of the executive. We'll see how seriously they take this matter.

David Goldman thinks like a mensh. Man I really love the way his mind works and he's got the stuff down cold. Here he pitches a scenario.

First, Citigroup’s structured portfolio of “toxic” assets is extremely cheap and manageable now that it doesn’t have to be marked to market. You own a bunch of this garbage anyway, and fund managers turn up on your doorstep daily to pitch distressed investing. You can do a whole lot better buying a distressed bank and leveraging a distressed asset play. Secondly, you can sell off most of Citi’s operations for a modest profit. America doesn’t need another branch bank after Wells Fargo/Wachovia, Chase/Washington Mutual, and Bank of America. Citi should get out of its consumer businesses and devolve into an international wholesale bank. Its main profits should be the runoff on its portfolio, which out to be worth a lot more than $3 a share. Third, by owning a major bank you get a seat at the table of corporate America. You get a peak inside the kimono at every American corporation and the inside track on future mergers and acquisitions. The business intelligence value of owning the franchise has to be worth a few billion dollars. That’s not counting Citi’s international branch network, which would give you the inside track on a dozen countries you don’t know much about. Presuming that the Obama administration throws its political shield over the deal and hails it as a great win for the American taxpayer (presuming you pay a bit more than $3.25 a share so that the Treasury can book a profit on its own 36% of Citigroup), it could be a very wise move. I wouldn’t underestimate the governance problems of running a monster like Citi — your managers will experience great frustration dealing — but at roughly $20 billion, you can afford the experience. After all, you have to learn to run great international finance franchises some time. Why not now?

Of course Citi is too big to fail, for the obvious reason that it is too valuable to merely disappear. Once upon a time I figured Warren Buffet would buy it. Maybe Shell should, or maybe Shell doesn't need it at all. In any case, we will be learning who are really the last big capitalists standing.

"I was having a great time" on the show, Penn said yesterday in a conference call with reporters. "The word I still use to describe it is bittersweet. It's not like I'm retiring from acting. I certainly intend to come back at some point. Right now, I just felt like my calling was in public service."

I haven't bothered to remark on Obama's undermining of his 'thoughtful' position on abortion. But here's one thing that makes me agree with those who said he's just flat out lying.

The Vatican has quietly rejected at least three of President Obama's
candidates to serve as U.S. ambassador to the Holy See because they
support abortion, and the White House might be running out of time to
find an acceptable envoy before Mr. Obama travels to Rome in July, when
he hopes to meet Pope Benedict XVI.

Three times? How can you be so incredibly dismissive? Well, there's one thing he's doing he said he would - he is showing his transparency.

UPDATE from MoJ

This question has been addressed on MOJ here and here.
The answer may be technically "no" because "no candidates have been
formally submitted." But, according to the London Times, the answer is
"yes" - three candidates have been rejected in the informal vetting process, including Caroline Kennedy and Doug Kmiec.

UPDATE: President Obama would be well served, IMHO, by selecting a pro-life Democrat MOJ blogger as Ambassador to the Vatican.

April 09, 2009

I'm still on the mailing list from MoveOn.org because I was one of those people who believed that Clinton's sex life, though scadalous, was none of everybody's business. So I get to hear some of the high level propaganda which generates reactions in their constituency. Since I know some of you are out there, perhaps you can throw some intelligent light on the following populist blather:

The Republicans' claim about Obama's energy plan is so absurd that one newspaper called it a "pants-on-fire" lie.1
The truth is that President Obama wants polluting industries, not working families, to pay for the costs of transitioning
to clean, renewable sources of energy.

The fact is, GOP lawmakers are taking their cues from Big Oil and Big Coal, who are afraid that a clean-energy jobs bill
will cut into their profits. And the best way to fight back is by showing Congress that small businesses across America are
eager to begin putting people back to work in jobs that'll rebuild our economy for the 21st century.

We all know Obama said that he was going to put 'Big Coal' out of business. Is this really what his supporters want, or is it just another way to get more taxes out of them than out of 'little solar'? We've already seen the Obama administration alienate companies he's tasked with helping by his onerous demands. Pray tell what happens to those which suffer his animus from the start?

Vernon Reid famously said that your favorite song was a commodity before you ever heard it on the radio. This concept came to mind in a combination of reading things today first over at Blacksmythe and secondly over at Tooley's joint. How many in our generation are listeners?

Spence investigates the utility of listening to Booker T vs WEB arguments as we shake our heads in dismay over economic development and the proper discussion that is evidently not happening anywhere but in history texts for all we talk about those two. He comes to the same conclusion as I do. It's not only useless but dangerous.

Avery notes how much 'darker' we've gotten as he looks at the pages of Jet magazine in the 70s as they represented ideals of black beauty during that era. I note that, wow, we've come a long way. I did so in investigating a few pages of the Rodney Allen Rippy issue of 1975.

The most fun part of Jet is the bathing beauties and the music charts. It's the only part I read back in the day, making sure that I was hip. It's rather amazing that we couldn't know then that Carl Douglas would still be remembered and the Three Degrees would not. Everybody sings about Kung Fu Fighting, already I forget the song by the Three Degrees that I used to know and be inspired by, and I just read this stuff 20 minutes ago.

There are lots of ways to castigate consumer culture. But on the subject of Booker T. Washington and economic development there's no way to get around the bit about buckets and bootstraps. So when the conversation turns to the miracle of Obama's election and what it might mean to black Americans today, it's difficult for me to avoid the obvious comparisons. I don't know and won't guess what Washington might have said if he were not spinning in his grave or some other similar game played by us gadflies. But I do know what blacks who tend to be entrepreneurial and conservative have said about Obama today and last month and last year. They are more appropriate critics, and many of them said what I said. Obama gonna what? Yeah Right.

So it occured to me to throw Vernon Reid into the mix because Obama is the Funky President. And just like with teenagers looking at the back of Jet magazine, I percieve that many Americans are looking at the man at the top of the charts and singing the lyrics to his song. They are listeners. They are recieving the commodified products of a political machine, an industry that knew what to say before any speech was said.

I don't know how sad to feel for the guy who buys a Barry White album or the Isley Brothers single in hopes that playing it at the right time will make the right girl have the right feeling for him. I don't know how sad to feel for the girl who listens to Lionel Ritchie and dreams of having the right guy say those exact same words, once, twice, three times. But I'm sure there are some awfully clever songwriters and musicians who are glad they do. Because they get paid and they get power putting together those notes and lyrics. Until there are music stores and radio stations full of romantic product. Not romance; it's not the real thing, it's just the commodified product.

I do feel sad for the guy who buys a political promise hoping that invoking it at the right time will make the right somebody do the right something for him. Maybe the right congressman will put together the right jobs program. The right think tank will come out in support of his 'silver rights'. I'm sure there are some awfully clever speechwriters and pollsters who are glad they do. They get paid and they get power putting together those phrases about hope and change and reform and diplomacy and other such commodified democratic shiny things. Not progress; it's not the real thing. It's just commodified progressivism.

You know a good song when you read about it on the Jet top 20. You can sing it and you can't wait to hear the next time the DJ gives you the new song from your favorite band. You listen attentively for inspiration.

Perhaps we have a generation of attentive listeners. But how many can play instruments for themselves? OK let's not be too demanding. How many of us have a piano in our home upon which a talented friend might play for the party? That used to be the way it was up in Harlem back in the days of a rent party. We actually knew the piano player and we actually sung the song right there and it wasn't a commodity. It wasn't part of The System we all love to hate. But we threw our own parties - we didn't go to the club and stand in line and wait to be searched for weapons, or picked up by some dude with a big fancy car.

Yeah everybody's waiting for 2010 and 2012 when we all get a chance to undo some of our 'doing' the last time we cast a ballot at the clever commodities exchange we call democracy. Meanwhile we talk about what some old artists might have done or said before we were born. What would Booker say about...? I'm not listening.

April 08, 2009

I've found a new interesting blog called Mirror of Justice concerned with Catholic legal theory. The author Berg, underscores a point I've been making which is point three (emphasis mine).

The primary religious-liberty concern is not the one dealt with in
the Vermont statute: that objecting clergy or houses of worship would
have to perform or host same-sex marriages. That prospect seems
extremely unlikely anyway. Attacks on the tax-exempt status
of traditionalist churches are more likely, but still doubtful.
But recognition of gay marriage will definitely make it more
likely that religious schools and social services, even those with
religious content throughout their programs, will be punished if they
refuse to hire openly gay people as teachers or counselors or to pay
benefits to their partners. It may do this in several ways: (1) Most
obviously, directly triggering the obligation to pay spousal benefits.
(2) Depriving religious organizations of the (sometimes successful)
argument that they discriminate against all extramarital sex and not on
the basis of sexual orientation. See CLS v. Walker, 453 F.3d 853,
860 (7th Cir. 2006). (3) Strengthening the gay-rights argument that
there is a compelling governmental interest against sexual-orientation
discrimination, overriding a constitutional religious freedom claim, in
virtually every context -- not just marriage but also hiring and other
associational decisions by private religious organizations. See, e.g.,
Bob Jones Univ. v. U.S. (allowing stripping of tax exemption on ground
that prohibition of race discrimination in numerous other contexts
shows a "firm national policy" and a compelling, overriding interest).

It may be time for defenders of traditional opposite-sex marriage to
shift some attention from trying to stop gay marriage to trying to
secure religious liberty protections, at least in states where there is
a significant prospect that the courts or the legislature will
recognize gay marriage. Once that decision of recognition has
happened, the traditionalist religious organization is on much
weaker strategic ground in seeking protection to continue to pursue its
vision of marriage in its employment and other decisions. As Doug
Laycock suggests in the conclusion to the excellent book of essays Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty, there
is opportunity at the front end to secure legislative compromises in
which any recognition of same-sex marriage is accompanied by
significant exemptions. The exemptions should cover not just
churches refusing to perform ceremonies -- symbolically important, in
practice not a live issue -- but also religious schools and social
services in their employment, leadership, and membership decisions.
But if traditionalists fight all the way to the mat on stopping gay
marriage altogether, they may lose opportunities to secure such
protection.

Some time ago, I expressed sympathy for a particular plan by Zingales to manage the problem with the housing market, which was one of the major causes for the current economic crisis. Everybody seems to want to talk about fatcat culpability these days, be they AIG execs, the Obama team or the Congressional firm of Frank, Dodd, Pelosi and Horsebottom. (Horsebottom being the senior partner). Of course there are also those with some historical facility and they remind us that it was Greenspan and monetary policy in general which is to blame. But let's go back to Zingales shall we?

Zingales' idea is this. You look for all of the mortgage holders by
zipcode whose housing price has declined 20% or greater. Instead of
them defaulting, they work out an agreement with the originator that
reprices the mortgage with the provision that 50% of the profit from
the sale of the house goes to the originator. Simple.

It allows the mortgage to be recalculated therefore lowering monthly
payments, keeps the individual in their house, keeps people with a lot
of equity from taking advantage, and doesn't involve any taxpayer
money. Of course there will be no politicians to champion it because
there's no end in it for them. It doesn't allow them to take any
credit, spend any government money, raise or lower taxes.

Let's keep in mind that there are terms of art that people in the business are throwing around relatively quickly that we in the public aren't quite clear about. But what makes the assets toxic? It's the probability that they are mortgage backed securities and that those mortgages might default. The chances of that are somewhat unpredictable, but it's clear that the people who hold those mortgages who are underwater are more likely to default. If we look at that 20% group and work out deals then we know they are less likely to default but it also means a writedown of the value of the assets and the amount of coverage on the mortgage backed securities. But it's certainly a lot more concrete than what we have now.

So the question is without a Zingales plan in place, what is the Administration doing to keep people in their homes? I'm not sure what the answer is, but what I'd like to do is warn against any action that results in re-inflating the house prices. In simple terms, we can raise housing prices through some mechanism or we can lower them through some mechanism similar to Zingales. The latter is more prudent even though the former might be more politically popular.

This is the downside of monetary policy which the Administration hopes will get banks to loan. Loan what? Mortgages of course. The magic number being passed around is 4.25% which is something of a blockbuster historical low for 30 fixed conforming mortgage rates. There could be a huge refinance market, and this works miracles for affordability. But then what do we do with that but hope it invites a new class of Americans to the trought of cheap credit for home ownership and that clears homes off the market and starts the ecnomy going again. How? By raising home prices again. Reinflating the bubble.

The hard fact must be, I think, that without Zingales, all that happens is that people with some extra money (remember it's damned hard to get credit these days) can snap up homes from foreclosures. That may be all that's going to happen and everybody who lost equity just lost it for good. To get back to where we were before the crash is to re-enter the bubble. It sounds good for people eager for recovery, but that froth was the original problem.

What's a reasonable outcome for the housing market and mortgage rates? I don't know. I just want to sound that cautionary note, because it makes perfect sense to me. I hope the rates will stay low and that credit eases for the consumer.

I hope that for my own sake, all of the speculation in California ceases and the rise in home prices stabilizes to something like the other states. I hope that renegotiated debt for equity swaps puts healthy assets onto bank balance sheets and that helps keep home prices low, and I hope people who were burned playing with the equity in their homes can stay put and sell their jet-skis, chastened but not broken.

For the past several months I have been making efforts to sharpen my economic reading. I feel pretty good about the effort. So I summarize.

BlogsThe first stop on the road to enlightenment is the blogosphere. So I've added and subtracted and aded blogs to my RSS aggregator, Google Reader. The survivors are as follows:

Cafe Hayek

Econbrowser

Inner Workings

Becker Posner

RGE Global Monitor

Marginal Revolution

Honorable mention goes to Brad De Long and Dan Dresner, who I used to read all the time but don't any longer.

I had a subscription to The Economist but I let it lapse. I found that it wouldn't say what the blogs were saying in the sort of analytical language I was looking for. Plus their classified ads are very depressing for people like me with no MBA.

HeadsI've got access to a blizzard stream of economic news by listening to Bloomberg podcasts. Every day I listen to at least three podcasts. Some days three hours of commuting and lunch would be filled with economic news and reviews. Through the efforts of two of the three finest journalists working today**, Ken Prewitt and Tom Keene really know their subjects and their topics. When it comes to getting up close to people who know, Blomberg Surveillance is unmatched. There is a raft of folks with exemplary insights into the financial industry and they include:

Robert Shiller

Barry Eichengreen

David Greenlaw

Steve Hanke

John Casesa

Charles Colomiris

Arthur Levitt

David Goldman

Richard Clarida

Maryann Keller

Mohammed El-Erian

Tyler Cowen

FirmsI have only come to really think about two companies in all of this. Well maybe three. The first is Sanford Bernstein. If I had moola, I'd have them watch my moola. The second is Pimco. They know bonds, period. I am really fascinated by the bond industry and hope that as I get through Knuth I can build my own models and come to understand it a bit. The maybe third firm is Hambrecht & Quist, because they are a small venture capital firm and was always a sound player in my industry. Now that mega venture capital firms are shutting down, the cycle comes back to places like H&Q. I like that.

IdeasThere aren't major theories that I have learned so much over these past few months. I haven't approached it like that - so much as to become more familiar with the territory. I think I am coming to understand more about how folks make their money in the finance industry and even what I am not doing in my own corner of my industry that the big boys are actually doing. I'm a bit astonished to discover how little what my class of customers have been doing with regard to what can actually be done.

But there is one big thing I think I have learned which is the extent to which credit and banking fuels growth and how much working saved and leveraged money does in the American system.

MysteriesI still don't understand how it is that businesses get to manage assets off their balance sheets, what those assets are and how they move. I don't understand all of the implications of the Federal Reserve printing money and the Treasury buying it up. Or is it the other way around? I don't understand how frequently ratings agencies get to do what they do and how material their judgments are in markets and if it makes a difference to them how a security is structured.

InterestsI am interested to understand the bond market with more clarity. I want to know how bond auctions work, how liquid bond markets are and where currency arbitrage fits into the equation. I want to know how bond traders and investors read the motions in their markets and what makes the difference - what the key spreads are and how folks make money, where the volume is blah blah.

What I SeeWhat I see is a stronger America at the end of this crisis and recession. I see a chance to inflate safely out of it, but some really hard edges in the bond market emerging so that if they get past a certain tolerance truly drastic actions will have to be taken, and that depends on who defaults on what big obligations and when. I see most stocks going sideways for period of years - kinda like me working at Xerox in the 80s, and companies really boring and afraid to take risks with American employment consolidating into fewer, more giant and stagnant firms. Except for biotech as soon as it does what research says it might.

**The other journalist is Peter Windsor who is brilliant for the Speed Channel.

Nosocomial infections are infections which are a result of treatment in a hospital
or a healthcare service unit, but secondary to the patient's original
condition. Infections are considered nosocomial if they first appear 48
hours or more after hospital admission or within 30 days after
discharge. Nosocomial comes from the Greek word nosokomeion (νοσοκομείον) meaning hospital (nosos = disease, komeo = to take care of). This type of infection is also known as a hospital-acquired infection (or more generically healthcare-associated infections)-- Wikipedia

So I'm driving to pick up my daughter from her friend's house, and two women are on the radio. One is impersonating a nose. The other pretends to be a pair of eyes, presumeably on the same face. They tell of a fabulous new allergy medication (some name that ends with 'air') that treats both of them at once - a medical threesome.

Allergy medications are not allergy medications of course. They only treat the symptoms. You know, itchy watery red eyes (says she) and drippy cloggy sneezy nose (says she, nasally). And as usual they get to the list of side effects. We're all used to this but I didn't expect to hear glaucoma, cataracts and nasal fungus. Nasal fungus? Then the capper - they actually say 'please don't spray it in your eyes'.

I am reading up in Amity Shlaes, who has already earned the great emnity of the Left by publishing her book 'The Forgotten Man'. It's a very useful history for me and of course it's controversial because she likes Herbert Hoover (so far) and Wendell Willkie. I am coming to appreciate, among other things, how contentious was the matter of rural electrification and the the nature of the battles over public utilities. But ultimately I expect to find from Shlaes those actions and reactions in the wake of the Crash of '29 that were cures worse than the disease. I'm trying to understand how the excess of politics gives us the prospect of a medical threesome which ends up as nasal fungus and cataracts. Which then of course must be treated with medical marijuana.

I expect that my sister, whom I'm trying to integrate into the blog somehow, might be able to tell me in her spare time what is so fabulous about the medical system in Cuba that she's fond of. And so as I spend a tiny bit of time understanding those KPIs, I'll keep my eye out for the nosocomial infections. While I'm not so cynical that I think the whole world is polluted beyond reclamation, I don't doubt that we Americans are particularly susceptible to buying into foolishness. In attempts to be pain-free we jump out of Teflon coated Calphalon into the stainless Bertazzoni cooktop. We may be stupid, but we do it with style. Heaven forbid we walk around with itchy eyes sounding nasally.

Something about this sort of consumer desperation reminds me of my lunch with the Scandinavian journalist in Long Beach several years back. He was visiting for a tech conference and we happened to meet and speak. I bought him a drink with my blue debit card and explained how everybody in America knows that gold credit cards are a more impressive way to spend the exact same amount of money than with a blue debit card. He happened to have been raised on lentil soup. Every day that's what he ate as a youth. I recall my old toast 'Top of the food chain!', and I'm certain we had appetizers (appetizers!) from all over the world set before us. Even the waiter who serves us will respect us more if I use this card instead of that.

It is a sense of constant amazement with which I find human interest in the semiotic offerings of life. PT Barnum was correct of course, and more of us are suckers than we care to admit. You can, for a while, pull an economy out of a hat. So there is a market for medicines that don't heal, for securities that are insecure, for policies that are just talk all with great downside risks. It is unnerving to me as a scientific professional. It is alluring to me as somebody who would like a faster class of automobile. It is tragic to me as a moral individual. I shrug in my commentary. Human nature is what it is.

To be fair, most people do not die from dealing with the deadly. They only die. Our attention is drawn to the oddment of the side-effect gone horribly wrong. Terror twinkles and our vision takes us towards such flashy ugly things. It is an evolutionary feature and we'll never get over it. But I think there's a creeping up here. I hope that I am merely becoming more aware as I age and that my own fear is such an evolutionary feature. I hope that it is not the case that the world is going to Hell in a cloud of nasal spray.

I have become a billionaire and I am bored with my billions. I need to find another way to buy the things that money can't buy. There has got to be another game than Mafia Wars. Mafia Wars is a fun little game on Facebook. I've been playing it for several weeks now and it has just hit the wall.

There are several objectives to Mafia Wars. Gain experience, gain money, gain associates. There are several ways to all of those things and one of those ways is a marketing backdoor called The Godfather who will grant you brownie points if you just buy from one of their many sponsors. Zynga, the developers have certainly made a tidy pile of money with this clever game and its variants.

To describe all of the complexities of the game would be something of a waste of time. I am drawn to describe its limits which are exactly the same as its virtues. For one thing, like most MMO games, there are always a universe full of players many orders of magnitude more powerful. But as you increase in stature, around level 70, the mega-players become a bit more availed to your quivering backside. The game becomes a lot more difficult in that there are fewer peers to compete with and fewer marks to pick on. You yourself become a mark, and suddenly the whole thing doesn't seem fair any longer.

Secondly, as predictable, there are no macro level events of the sort that would make things very interesting. For example, one of the things you can do is earn money and buy properties which yeild some cash flow. So there's a little microeconomic model which makes for the kind of price inflation and lower ROI so that you don't buy infinite numbers of properties. There are also ways to buy insurance so that when rivals attack your properties it makes it a bit harder for them. But there are no disasters that befall your property's earning power. You simply amass more cash and buy ever more expensive properties. I have something like 23 mega-casinos valued at 107 million each. But there's nothing bigger to buy.

Thirdly, you amass energy in order to pull off various heists and crimes. Completing a tier of such jobs gains you greater honoraria. From thug to associate, soldier and enforcer to hitman, capo and consigliere. You work your way up to underboss, boss and master boss. But the inflating costs of jobs means it takes me 24 hours to earn enough energy to finish one level. I'm almost a level two capo, but I don't want to work any more. I could buy more energy from the Godfather, but what's the point?

There is a 'friending' marketplace to attract other players to join your team. As you might imagine, it's like volleyball. Nobody wants duds on their team. Of course you can always go to the Godfather and buy friends.

You can buy health, energy and even money, but everything inflates. Every bank deposit costs 10%.

Playing Mafia Wars has made it perfectly clear to me how inflation kills all the fun of being a billionaire, and how, when you have billions, the longer you have them, the more you want to change the rules of the game and attempt to buy the things that money can't buy according to the rules of the game. It also makes it perfectly clear to me how foolish it is to lie about the nature of success. You never know which Capo will become Underboss or if they might become your friend.

April 06, 2009

I'm not sure if that's a supply sider's argument or if people championing economic stimulus at any cost tend to favor the sentiment. But I am rather sure that it's a sucker's bet. But I must confess that I am thinking particularly about Web 2.0 and 3.0 and social network software in general.

I keep coming back to the simplistic models of business the Internet has provided. If you ask me there are only four or five real business models in use on the web.

iTunesOne is iTunes which is, as far as I can see, the only real client server application out there with a fat client. The problem with iTunes is that the client is a real pig, which is rather what all the champions of thin clients used to say when that whole thin client megatrend began around the limitations of Windows 95.

AmazonAmazon is B2C personified. It is online retail perfected and with nary a brick, has shown the perfectability of that thing everyone once said could not be done. Jeff Bezos is one of the very few high tech moguls that I would dare to call an industrialist. The other is Larry Ellison. I continue to think that Bill Gates was just lucky. If Linus Torvalds had been born first, Microsoft would not exist any more than Lotus Development. It is poetic justice the Ray Ozzie is (sorta) running things at Microsoft.

GoogleGoogle is really the only game in town for eyeballs. Back in the day it was easy to understand that DoubleClick ruled the internet with regards to selling online advertising. But all of the content on the planet, which is to say, the disintermediation of print and video which is bankrolled by the monetization of clicks and impressions, all goes to Google. That basically means every site that is Googlable and does not charge a subscription. News, weather, sports, all that. In the end, it is searched, and in the end it is Google.

BloombergI don't know what the most successful online subscription model is, but I tend to believe that it is something like Bloomberg or Lexis/Nexis. This is people paying for a real online service. But it also would include Verizon FIOS HD Pay Per View. The bottom line it it's some big piece of data or many small pieces of data you consume but don't keep (as contrasted to iTunes, which you keep).

eBay

eBay enables C2C. It's the winner. I don't even know if anything else came close.

There is something to be said for CRM-ish applications. Cars Direct or Online Banking. Their money is not made by having the website it is part of their customer interface and experience. That's understandable, but...

It is my opinion that everything else everybody else has built has seen them come and watched them go and 10,000 Web 2.0 etc companies will die for lack of a better business model. What else on the web is really different? Porn? Porn is subscription like iTunes. It's arguably bigger, but the business model is the same, minus DRM. Online gaming is subscription, like Bloomberg. Blogs are Google. Online dating is probably the exception, now that I think about it. That's affinity profiling. A kind of eBay with a smart search algorithm.

Christopher Hitchens offers us a little benchmark to see if our President, who tends not to believe in any sort of war except those involving pure rhetoric, is going to be true to one of his many words. We should make the mental note on whether or not he waters down his rhetoric in the interest of making friends on the question of the Armenian Genocide.

President Obama comes to this issue with an unusually clear and
unambivalent record. In 2006, for example, the U.S. ambassador to
Armenia, John Evans, was recalled for employing the word genocide.
Then-Sen. Obama wrote a letter of complaint to then-Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, deploring the State Department's cowardice and
roundly stating that the occurrence of the Armenian genocide in 1915
"is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but
rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of
historical evidence." On the campaign trail last year, he amplified
this position, saying
that "America deserves a leader who speaks truthfully about the
Armenian genocide and responds forcefully to all genocides. I intend to
be that president."

I expect some weasel words to be forthcoming just on general principle. Anyone who is willing to overlook what Iranians are doing in current conflicts - ie killing American soldiers in Iraq, certainly should have no problem brushing off something that happened almost 100 years ago. And I'm confident that he can come up with all sorts of bold and visionary reasons to bathe such weasels in the glow of his version of the future.

But here is just a convenient test of character. So let's see what comes of it.

April 05, 2009

My official position of Barack Obama is this: "We'll survive his foolishness." Which is rather what I think his blather is on nuclear weapons this weekend. I mean really. He talks about the idea that we should be nuclear free, but it's not going to happen in his lifetime. It sounds exactly like something middle schoolers would say.

Anyway. I've heard one little bitty argument against the anti-Nork sentiment which runs something to the effect that they're too weak to matter. They can't build a nuke and they can't build an ICBM. These are the same people who are highly offended by my use of the word 'retarded'. The sort that love to remind us how special children are special. Whatever. The fact is that the Norks are trying to poke us in the eye. So what if it's a plastic fork and not a carbon steel stiletto? It's their aim that matters.

I tire of having better information than my rhetorical opponents. I'll add salient points in the comment section as Belmont and Spook86 make them.

I'm working my way into my penultimate discipline, and I expect it to be the font of my best living. Before I hunker down into my last house and write books into the twilight of life, I will be getting down to my retirement weight, comprehending Western Civ, getting through Knuth and attending services. As to that last measure of devotion, there is a surprising contender: The Church of the Advent.

I should be on my way there by all rights for today is Sunday and the 8am service is the one I like. But my discipline is not complete and I have other priorities for the day. Still, 'the one I like' is a large part of this decision. I am drawn to God for reasons I can identify, reasons I can prioritize or change. I take the idea that doubt increases the value of faith when I'm into explaining, but I also take it on faith that I may not deserve God's grace. The two combine to make it an absolute necessity to find the proper way to deal with God, and that is why I seek Church.

I'm having a cheeky bit of row with someone named Olga over on Facebook, and it appears that way because we are limited to two tiny paragraphs in their interface. I hope to get her over here, as well as another surprise guest. But it is that little spark that reminds me of how weak secular humanism is in the face of Christianity. Secular humanism doesn't have a church. They have dorm room commons, they have seminars and soap boxes. They have sections of the blogosphere and newsletters. They have think tanks and university departments, they have essays and reading lists, and there might even be an edited multivolume compliation. But in the end they are awfully distributed and woefully disheveled as compared to Church. How can they stand it?

Albert Murray famously for me said that literature was his religion. OK, so where's the dogma, Al? Where's the aesthetic, where are the rules? Or is it all about what I like?

I am faced with the reality that the Christian faith is not, and can never be, left behind technologically. Obama is not a Muslim and today his hand is on the Button. He stands in the shoes of the Leader of the Free World and though I think him undisciplined as I am in matters of Christian faith, I know he wouldn't deny the Cross. But secular humanism has only its ability, sporadic and arbitrary, to push back the 'shadow' of religion. It is in fact always overshadowed and all it has most of the time is pluck and luck. As Olga says, most atheists are not vocal. Well of course not, they don't have a hymnal. We Christians have hundred year old Hymnals with 300 year old songs passed around in 500 year old churches in capital cities that are 700 years old that were never not Christian. One wise aphorism I always remember is to never doubt the intelligence of people in power. I could punch holes in CS Lewis and take potshots at the Pope. That doesn't make me Lewis, which I'll never be - and I should never even dream of taking the Pope's place. These men inherit something very, very large, something that keeps abreast of every development the world has, and has done so for 1000 years.

Science will inevitably understand the brain. It will inevitably yeild up its discoveries, first to academia, then to the marketplace and finally to the public at large. But there is no Church of Science and it will never control its understanding of the brain. And in this world (obviously the only one scientists care about), humans will control all of the rewards of science, and the most powerful of them will be Christians. The scientific leadership will never defeat the Christian leadership and the Christian leadership will always have the larger set of weapons, the advantage of organization and the bigger army. In the realm of human achievement and knowledge, science will always be an integrated cult.

But for the moment, the universities own the libraries, and they charge exhorbitant fees for the use of their magical materials. Today as we witness the finale of March Madness and the Michigan State team challenges the North Carolina team, we have plenty evidence that there is loyalty in the secular arena. Millions of American families spend fortunes and decades preparing their offspring for the rites of SAT and it can certainly be argued that it is more difficult for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for anyone to get through the gates of Oxford. We're not doubting the intelligence of the powerful. Hell, Larry Summers somehow made 5.2 million bucks last year and nobody knows how. I don't mean to suggest that the secular institution is non-existent or has no ritual. But it still doesn't compare to Church.

As my great evidence of this, I offer a rather rascally piece of evidence which is Mark Steyn's book America Alone. I do so because it raises the, for me unanswerable if not imponderable question: whither Europe. How does the West lose faith in the West? Europe is the example. If America is the evolution, and I think it is, then America's solution to the European problem is the answer. There's no doubt that Obama has the right seductive charm for the symbolic task. I could elaborate on this, but that's for another moment.

Besides, for me the question is unanswerable. I have a lot of studying to do and I'll do it largely on my own - although having this blog helps a lot. It might help more if Olga would show up. But as for my other devotions, I know that getting my church on will replenish my spirit. There is no question of how Holy Communion does that for me, and I have found in the Church of the Advent over on Adams Boulevard, the oldest little brick building in the neighborhood I grew up in, something that works very deeply in my own personal soul. I have to do a good job of it, and I think that I can.

April 04, 2009

You can't make this stuff up.
On can only hope that the chicken tastes good. Or maybe the pretty banner is just a front and inside they actually sell government cheese. A trillion dollars worth.

I can't stop chuckling though. It really is funny to me, in a completely corny wholesome way. But it's interesting to watch the country work its way through this section of black middle class culture. This is a tribute, just like the portraits cut into men's hair by creative barbers. It's just black-tackularly ghetto fabulous. And it's about time we all get used to it, lighten up and have a good laugh. This is one of those nice things to cascade out of the existence of the first black president of the US, a less freighted recognition of the laughable cultural retardation of a whole lot of America. Like Flava Flav.